SYSK TRENDING-The Bright Side of Sadness

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1:22David Huron: What if one of the emotions we spend the most time trying to avoid is actually one of the most useful? Sadness doesn't feel good, but it may serve an important purpose, helping us think more carefully, connect more deeply with other people, and even appreciate life's joyful moments a little more. And that's why today's SYSK trending topic is The Bright Side of Sadness. So why do we experience sadness in the first place? And what happens when we stop seeing it as something to fix and start seeing it as something to understand? My guest today is David Huron, a cognitive scientist who has spent years exploring the surprising benefits of sadness.

2:08David Huron: He'll explain why sadness isn't just an unfortunate part of being human. It may actually help us thrive. It's a fascinating conversation, and you'll hear it right after this.

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3:40David Huron: Generally, I think it's safe to say that people want to be happy. And there's plenty of talk in the media about how to achieve happiness. What you don't hear a lot about is sadness. Yet we've all felt sad, even struggled with sadness when it sometimes becomes overwhelming. And maybe, just maybe, sadness is a useful and necessary emotion that we need to understand better. Is sadness the absence of happiness? If you're sad, does that mean something's wrong with you? Is it okay to just let your sadness be, or should you try to get unsad? Are there different kinds of sadness? What's the difference between sadness, grief, and melancholy?

4:23David Huron: Or are they just different words for the same thing? Here to discuss all this and reveal what I guess you would call the bright side of sadness is David Huron. He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book, The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion. Hi, David. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

4:45Jill Carr: It's my pleasure to be able to join you, Mike.

4:47David Huron: So first, why don't you tell me what sadness is from how you look at it and you study it? What is, because everybody's felt it, but what is it that we're feeling?

4:58Jill Carr: Well, it's mostly a negative emotion. There are really three main sadness states, and they serve different purposes. There's melancholy, which is a sort of feeling glum or blue or forlorn. We're kind of resigned. And that's characterized by reflection. We tend to think a lot. We tend to resist efforts to cheer us up. And then there's grief, and that's very much linked to weeping. So sobbing or feeling choked up. And then there's nostalgia. Nostalgia is different from melancholy and grief because melancholy and grief are mostly unpleasant, negatively valenced experiences. But most nostalgic experiences are actually a mixture of bitter sweetness, we usually say.

5:45Jill Carr: And in fact, it's mostly positively valenced. So mostly people enjoy a bout of nostalgia.

5:53David Huron: So why, since it's mostly positive, why do you lump it in with grief?

5:59Jill Carr: Because there is a sad element to it. And the sad element is usually related to the loss of something that was valued in the past. So it could be a lost relationship or a place that you really enjoyed, an event or an object. It's mostly relationship oriented, but you could also be nostalgic for your grandmother's peach pie. or a favorite pair of shoes that you can no longer buy.

6:23David Huron: And so why is it important to understand more about sadness? I mean, as I said, everybody feels it some more than others. But what is it doing? Is it doing anything for us? Or it just, it's an emotion that comes and it goes?

6:39Jill Carr: Oh, it's very much beneficial. It's part of living the good life, actually, is having sadness in the right circumstances. I would hasten to add, though, that like many forms of emotions, there are pathological forms of sadness. So the pathological form of melancholy is depression, and that has no benefit at all. And there are pathological forms of weeping, for example. There's something called pseudobulbar affect, which is uncontrolled weeping. It usually happens from a stroke or from some sort of brain injury. At any rate, so first of all, it's important to distinguish the normal forms of sadness, normal forms of melancholy and grief, and the abnormal forms such as PBA or pseudobulbar effect or depression.

7:27Jill Carr: But we can point to research that directly indicates the benefits of melancholy, the benefits of grief or weeping, and the benefits of nostalgia.

7:37David Huron: And so what are those benefits of grief and weeping and melancholy?

7:43Jill Carr: Let's start off with melancholy. Normally, people are tuned to the optimistic side. We tend to think that we're more handsome or beautiful than even our friends would deem us to be. We tend to think that we're going to live longer than other people. Everybody thinks that they're a better driver than the average. Now, optimism is generally a good thing. So, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It encourages us to do all sorts of things. You might think that when we're sad, what we do is we switch these rose-tinted lenses for some sort of blue-tinted lenses. We think, oh, I'm no good. I'm a schmuck.

8:19Jill Carr: I can't do anything right and so on. But actually, when we're in a melancholic state, it turns out that we are our most accurate in our self-appraisals and in our thinking. And there's a huge amount of research on this. So compared with a happy or a neutral state, melancholy promotes more detailed oriented thinking. We rely less on stereotypes. We're less biased in our judgments. Our memories are more accurate. We're less gullible. We're more patient. We're more socially attentive. We're more polite. We have a heightened sense of fairness, for example. We're more skeptical. We're better at judging riskiness.

9:00Jill Carr: and we also tend to invite options more. So instead of just blasting ahead with a single idea, we're more willing to consider the options and we're more willing to change directions.

9:12David Huron: Well, that is good news.

9:12Jill Carr: So there are a lot of cognitive benefits to melancholy. Yeah, I guess so. And so what about grief? Grief has very different benefits than melancholy. So melancholy is really all about changing the way we think about the world and how we're going to plan ahead to try to deal with the stress that caused us to feel sad in the first place. Grief is a very different thing. So we can make a distinction generally in emotions between those emotions that are evident to others and those emotions that are completely private. So when we think of emotion displays, we think of anger and smiling and disgust and so forth, things that you can clearly see.

9:56Jill Carr: But most emotions that people experience are not visible. A person can feel lonely or jealous or bored or nostalgic, even feel in love, not to mention feelings of hunger. These feelings are opaque. People don't see those things. So when we talk about something like weeping, the whole biological purpose and social purpose is to engage others. So our reaction to someone when we see someone crying is this enormous feeling of empathy, this enormous feelings of compassion and commiseration. And it's this response of other people around us that ultimately helps us out. So one way of thinking about it, that the difference between melancholy and grief is that when we're addressing a stress of some sort, whether the stress is you've been fired from your job or your house is burned down or something like that, and we think, what resources are available to me to help me deal with this stressor?

10:59Jill Carr: So one is our own thoughts, just thinking clearly about things and trying to strategize. And the other very important resource is the people around us. So if we can solicit their help, that can also help us deal with the stressor in many, many cases. So melancholy is an internal state, whereas grief or weeping is really intended. It's a social response to dealing with stress.

11:25David Huron: But people cry, people weep, not only because they're sad, right?

11:31Jill Carr: People weep or cry in all sorts of circumstances, including tears of joy and so on, tears of pain, tears of laughter. So it turns out that these responses, the tearful responses, end up having the same effect on observers as tears of sadness, tears of grief. So what they mostly do is they encourage observers to really engage us, even if they're not able to help us. In the end, even if it's just a hug, these things can be very important to the people who are suffering these stresses.

12:07David Huron: Well, what about these tears of joy that, you know, like when you're watching a movie and there's some wonderful happy ending and it's actually embarrassing sometimes, I think, when you're crying at a movie, you don't want people to notice, you don't want people to engage you, you feel kind of foolish crying. That's very good.

12:27Jill Carr: There was a lovely study done by one of the major airlines a few years ago. When people are going for a long distance journey and they're watching a movie or something, it's often the case that in a movie, there'll be a tearjerker part. And in the survey, they were interested in how their passengers responded to these. And people can be embarrassed when they're, if you're sitting in the middle seat with strangers on either side and you've been brought to tears, it can be very unsettling. What was interesting was that women tended to respond by pretending that there was something caught in their eye.

13:08Jill Carr: And men tended to respond by taking a blanket and putting it over their head. So there is a cost to weeping and the cost is a loss of social status. So it's the reason why infants and children can cry so much because they've already relatively low status. Once you reach puberty, once you're engaging in a lot of social interaction and status becomes important, then people really make an effort not to cry. But that's simply because of the loss of social status with regard to observers. So there are excellent reasons why you should, in many circumstances, try to mask the experience of crying.

13:49David Huron: We're talking about sadness in a happy kind of way. And my guest is David Huron. He's author of the book, The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion.

14:31David Huron: So David, do we know why we cry when we're happy, tears of joy kind of thing? Because it is interesting that the same symptom, crying, tears, is the same for when you're really, really sad, and just the opposite, when you're really, really happy.

14:49Jill Carr: So the point of crying is not to express the feeling state that we're in, but to change the behavior of the observers. So when you think about it, here's a way to think about emotions and their displays. if we're playing poker and I'm dealt a really nice hand, it would be foolish of me to start smiling and being gleeful in any way, because that would just tip everybody's hand as to what cards I'm holding. To the extent that emotions predict future behavior, we have a kind of radar that we're constantly trying to infer what state a person is in, because it helps us predict what their behavior is going to be.

15:33Jill Carr: But this is to the detriment of the person who's making the display. In many cases, and that's the reason why the vast majority of emotions don't have a display, is we shouldn't be communicating to everybody what it is that we're feeling, because all we're doing is telling them, giving them information about how our future behavior might be. There's only one circumstance in which we want them to know what our future behavior might be, And that is if they respond to that in a way that's beneficial to us. So let's take an example of tears of pleasure, tears of joy. You know, the classic example here would be the weeping beauty pageant winner.

16:13Jill Carr: You would have thought that the ones who should be weeping are all the women on the stage who didn't win. So why is it that a beauty pageant winner is crying? In particular, why don't they behave in a way like, say, a boxing champion? You could imagine a situation where a beauty pageant winner thrusts her arms into the air and says, I am the greatest. And she turns to the other contestants and says, tough luck, suckers. Well, this would be wholly out of keeping with what it is that we expect of a beauty pageant winner. We want them to be magnanimous. We want them to be humane and reach out to other people.

16:55Jill Carr: And so the response of the audience to the crying is exactly the same response that we have when they're crying of grief. That is, we feel very positively disposed and want to be helpful to the person who has tears in their eyes, whether they're tears of joy or whether they're tears of grief.

17:14David Huron: But I'll admit to watching a movie all by myself and getting a little teary-eyed at the end, and there is no observer. I'm not displaying anything to anybody else.

17:25Jill Carr: That points to another thing that's important about many of these displays, and that is the automaticity of the display. So these things are innate, and part of what testifies to that innateness is the fact that we have very difficult time trying to control them. So they will happen in situations where there's nobody around as well.

17:47David Huron: So I'd like you to address, because I'm sure you've noticed, we live in a world, in a culture that is just obsessed with happiness. There are 4 ,000 podcasts about happiness, some best-selling books about happiness, that we all just need to cheer up and be happy. And you've taken like the other road and talked about the benefits of sadness. So what do you make of all that?

18:13Jill Carr: all of the emotions that we have exist because they're part of what makes us socially and biologically adapted. So the negative emotions have a bad rap, but they're very important. So let me give you an example, loneliness. So the feeling of loneliness is uncomfortable, it's not nice, but what the feeling of loneliness does is it encourages us to make social contact. In the long run, the feeling of loneliness is going to motivate us to make that kind of social contact and social connections and bonding with others that's going to benefit us. Or another example would be the feeling of pain. So nobody wants to feel pain, but pain is a very useful teacher and very useful in telling us, you know, don't do that.

19:05Jill Carr: It's avoid tissue damage. And there's a very rare condition in which people are born without pain sensors. And you might think, wow, what a great situation. Imagine you can go through life without suffering any of the slings and arrows of pain. But it turns out that people who are born without a pain sensation, they're typically dead by their mid-20s or so. And you might think that the reason for that might be they can't feel a swollen appendix, for example, so they die from appendicitis. But actually, the main reason why they die is because of circulation problems that arise because they don't feel these little points of irritation with regard to posture.

19:52Jill Carr: So when we're standing, every few minutes we lean to the left or lean to the right or move our bodies in particular ways. or when we're sitting, we just change our posture every now and then. And those are important. If you don't do that, you end up pinching nerves and pinching blood vessels, and you end up with very complicated problems. And that's the main reason why people without pain sensors die. So negative emotions like loneliness, like pain, and the various forms of sadness all serve a very useful function for people. In the right circumstances, sadness is simply part of good mental health.

20:33David Huron: Yeah, well, what you just said about loneliness so rings true because people talk about the pain of loneliness, that it's a motivator. You don't want to feel that. And the only way to not feel lonely is to not be lonely.

20:47Jill Carr: You got it. That's right.

20:50David Huron: Yeah.

20:50Jill Carr: Negative emotions have a bad rap.

20:52David Huron: Something that is often talked about as it relates to sadness is music. And I don't know if music can make you sad or if it just makes the sadness you have worse or what, but what makes sad music sad?

21:09Jill Carr: So we have to make a distinction between sad music that's sad because of the lyrics. And there are lyrics that are very sad that the musical setting is not especially sad. And then there's instrumental music that we can point to that's quite sad because it emulates the kinds of sounds that happen when a person is sad. And remember, there are two important sadness states, melancholy and grief. So in the case of melancholy, when you're in a melancholic state, you tend to speak with a lower pitched voice more quietly. You tend to mumble. There are a whole bunch of features acoustically that you can then see in music that people deem to be sad, like Samuel Barber's famous Adagio for Strings, which was played at Princess Diana's funeral.

22:00Jill Carr: Then the opposite of that is the grief component. And the grief component, when someone is crying, the acoustical features are very different. So then you have things that are high-pitched and loud and you hear this cracking voice and so on. And again, you can point to musical passages in which there's cracking voice or breaking voice, falsetto voice. there's a whole bunch of acoustical features that will tend to encourage listeners to hear the music as sad apart from from the lyrics so there are some objective criteria by which we can say people are likely to hear this as sad sounding whether it's emulating grief or whether it's emulating melancholic sounds and in many cases the music will music that people judge as sad will reveal both of those kinds of acoustical features.

22:52David Huron: But not necessarily make you sad, just because you're hearing it.

22:56Jill Carr: Yeah, that's right. In the same way that when we encounter someone who is crying, we don't necessarily feel grief ourselves. After all, the purpose of encountering somebody or being attentive to the weeping is to evoke feelings of compassion or commiseration towards that person. We feel pity for them or we feel their pain.

23:19David Huron: But then you could also hear a song that isn't sad at all, but, you know, oh, that was our song and I miss her so much. And every time I hear it, it makes me sad, but it's not a sad song. Yeah.

23:30Jill Carr: Now that, at that point, we're talking about nostalgia and nostalgia really has to do with linkages to feelings from past experience. And of course, it's true that you can feel that kind of sadness from any arbitrary association. It could be the happiest song in the world, but it happened at the time when you were breaking up and it was, you know, you have these negative associations. So that's also true.

23:56David Huron: What does the research say about if you're sad and it's lasting longer than you think, or you're sadder than you think you should be, or you want to get out of it, what helps to alleviate sadness? Dr.

24:10Jill Carr: David Hussman Social contact, that's the most important thing. Aristotle coined this term catharsis. It's actually a pretty colorful term. It actually, in the ancient Greek, means laxative. And he had this idea that somehow the emotions could be purged like a laxative. And that's an idea that's had legs for 2000 years. Freud adopted it. It's an idea of the idea of purging emotions has become a key concept in psychoanalysis. And there's lots of research about that. There are some good things to say about crying. So just the crying itself, mutual crying in particular, you're never so socially connected with someone else as when you're both engaged at the same time in crying.

24:55Jill Carr: But crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. That's what the research shows. And there's no long-term benefits from that. So, the benefits of weeping really depend on the presence of other people, people who are moved to help, even if that's nothing more than just a consoling hug. But it's really the social contact that is key to responding to these sadness states in a way that's helpful to the person who's experiencing it.

25:22David Huron: That's really interesting. So, a good cry isn't really any good unless somebody's with you.

25:29Jill Carr: That's what the research shows, exactly. The research shows that crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. It's the presence of someone else. And when you look at the reports, when people say, oh, it was so helpful for me to cry. When you look at those things, you find out that there's very likely someone else that was there.

25:46David Huron: Well, this has been a unique look at an emotion that I think many of us think is one to get rid of. If you're feeling sad, you want to do what you can to get through it and get over it. But there's a lot to it. And I appreciate you coming on to explain it. I've been speaking with David Huron. He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book, The Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion. Now, you could go to Amazon and pay$50 for a copy of his book, or you can have it for free. David is giving away PDF copies of his book to our listeners for free. and all you have to do is go to the show notes, and there is a link in the description, and you click on that link, and it'll take you to the page where you can get your free copy.

26:31David Huron: Thanks for coming on and explaining all this, David. I appreciate you being here.

26:36Jill Carr: It was my pleasure to be able to join you.

26:38David Huron: I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening to this SYSK Trending episode on Something You Should Know.